Page 31 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 22
you will be one of us!’—an appeal which is part and parcel of a more populist ideology,
in which values of communality, emotional involvement and humour predominate.
It seems, then, that different types of involvement, based upon different ideological
positions, can be constructed by televisual discourse. It does not make sense, therefore, to
see televisual discourse as a basically unified text without essential internal
contradictions, despite its apparent diversity. An analysis of televisual discourse as a
whole might prove to be more fruitful if we look for the real tensions in it, for the
contradictions in the appeals it attempts to create for the viewers. In other words, we
should analyse the different positions offered to viewers in relation to televisual
discourse, and the ways in which these positions are inscribed within different parts or
levels of TV programming. From here, we can then go on to ask how viewers relate to
those positions. Or to put it in a slightly different way: how do socially defined audience
preferences correspond to the variety of televisual address?
It is an empirical fact, for instance, that different sections of the social audience relate
differently to specific programme categories. To avoid a wholly sociological explanation
of this we should attempt to relate the alternation of acceptance and rejection of what TV
offers its viewers to the heterogeneous structure of televisual discourse itself, and to the
fact that the types of involvement suggested by televisual discourse don’t all have the
same rhetorical power. In this way, the socio-cultural effectivity of television, which is
merely stated in Ellis’s work, can be returned to the analysis, for it is the connection of
rhetorical strategies (or the failure to achieve such a connection) to the audience’s
perspective of viewing which is at issue here.

THE POLITICS OF ‘TROSSIFIED’ TELEVISION

To make this theoretical argument rather less abstract, I shall now provide an
interpretation of the history of Dutch television. More precisely, I would like to say
something about one particular moment in this history, which has come to be known as
the moment of ‘trossification’ (‘vertrossing’). This neologism stands for the increase of
commercialized programming within Dutch broadcast television from the early 1970s
onwards—a development which has led to a lot of worried debates among media
specialists, journalists, politicians and other intellectuals. I would like to take issue with
their gloomy reflections here and will try to show that ‘trossified television’ can be seen
as a consequence of the failure of Dutch broadcasting politics to take into account the
audience’s perspective of viewing and to make the viewers feel involved with its
programming policies. First, however, it is necessary briefly to outline the Dutch
broadcasting system.
It is relevant here to note that heterogeneity of televisual discourse is a legal
requirement laid down in the 1967 Broadcasting Act. This Act contains a clause which
decrees that every broadcasting organization entitled to transmission time should present
a ‘comprehensive’ programme schedule, consisting of ‘cultural, informative, educative
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and entertainment’ programmes. Although this formalized heterogeneity does not
necessarily coincide with a heterogeneity of modes of address, as the formal categories
refer primarily to a prescribed heterogeneity of social functions of televisual discourse, it
should be clear that, ideologically speaking, this formal distinction of programme